I enjoy helping spruce up the wiki more than posting to the message board. The modding discussions and talk about the cvr format stuff fascinate me though. That and the occasional talk about custom units and improving the AI.

Fairly certain I'm not a bot, read too much philosophy in college to say I'm sure. Currently fiddling around with save-scumming as the -ites to see if I can get a diplomatic victory before mission year 2120. I enjoy "cheating" without triggering the cheated message in single player just to see what can theoretically be accomplished.

I think I found AC2 via Apolyton a while back, and lurked.

I've been claiming to be the world expert at SP cheating/exploits in AC - check threads I started in Bug/Patch (most of the cheats are bugs) and see if you can school me or are impressed...

Hello all. I'm Jon and I have almost no spare time to actually play, so I tend to get my gaming fix through watching others and reading forums on my breaks at work. I'd love to post an AAR one day, but the odds of having the time for that are pretty low. Maybe I'll try to write one up in advance and then post periodically, if I ever get more time. With 3 kids under 4, that's probably not in the cards anytime real soon but who knows.

Anyway, it's great to see this site still chugging along (I've lurked on and off for years). I'll try to contribute where and when I can. My first in-game goal is to run a couple of games with Yitzi's patch and see how that affects the game for me.

I'm afraid I don't remember how I found this site, but I think it may have been through some of the other forum sites that focus on the Civilization series and its offshoots. I joined this site in April 2014, seeking assistance with modding the game and making use of one of the recent patches of the time. It didn't take long for me to just disappear.

In March 2015, my computer at the time had stopped working. After I bought a replacement, I found that it lacks a disk drive. At that point, I had decided to move on from SMAC/X.

As the years passed, both before and after 2015, I still thought of how I would mod the game, or make some of the mechanics in later 4X games similar to SMAC/X. The social engineering table and the terrain adjacency bonuses were considerable inspirations.

Fast forward to this year when I decided that moving on from this game was not the best idea. A week ago, I joined gog.com and bought a version of the Planetary Pack that doesn't require a disk. And I must say, it feels good to be back. And now I discovered an interesting late-game terraforming strategy: echelon mirrors in fungus.

The game still suffers horrific imbalances when unmodified, though, so I will want to start up my projects to restore balance to the game soon. This time, my ambitions have risen higher, and I now wonder: How can I go about learning how to properly edit the .exe file the way experts like Yitzi and Scient and Kryub have?

Here's to hoping I'll stick around longer this time. Thank you!

Logged

I'm back from the dead and would very much like to learn how to modify the .exe files.

Personally, having just put 1.5 man months into the mother of all mods to try to solve various problems, I do not believe in starting with .exe patching. Be sure that someone didn't solve, or attempt to solve, the problems you're worried about simply with modding. My DESIGN notes and CHANGELOG are extensive and readily available in the Modding subforum.

This wouldn't be my first endeavor into modifying the game. In the past, I had altered the alpha and alphax text files pretty extensively to disable game-breaking items, keep present options in all areas worthwhile, and make sure a player (or the AI) couldn't stumble into something horrific like the effects of -3 Growth or -4 Efficiency.

If limited to the text files, I'll do my best to work around more hard-coded issues, much like I had done in the past. However, I would like to tackle them directly. I want to do things like make supply crawlers unable to cash themselves in to building secret projects, give increased support costs to more powerful units, and change the effects of facilities and society levels. (Maybe if the Economy rating affected gross income instead of whether you get +1 energy per square.)

Logged

I'm back from the dead and would very much like to learn how to modify the .exe files.

I want to do things like make supply crawlers unable to cash themselves in to building secret projects,

I just made them so much later in the tech tree, that it's going to be a very long time before anyone gets any benefit out of them at all.

Quote

give increased support costs to more powerful units,

I just made Fusion, Quantum, and Singularity engines at the end of the tech tree. Powerful fission units are expensive. It's not an ongoing support penalty, but it's certainly a production penalty, and definitely slows down the number of units someone can have.

Quote

and change the effects of facilities

To what though? There are only so many things a facility could do, even in the abstact. I just put them earlier or later in the tech tree, depending on whether I thought they were underpowered or overpowered. Bear in mind that Future Societies are late midgame techs in my tree, not endgame techs. You're expected to play a lot of the game with 4 social engineering choices.

Quote

and society levels.

I've extensively reworked the Social Engineering choices over many iterations of design now. I'm fairly happy with the results at present, but I do not promise that they're perfected. Screenshots attached.

Quote

(Maybe if the Economy rating affected gross income instead of whether you get +1 energy per square.)

In a sense it already does. You have to be getting Commerce income though.

My biased opinion is, the only thing actually worth patching the .exe for, and introducing that level of incompatibility, maintenance, potential new bugs, and legacy support when you finally get tired of working on it, is if the AI improves. My experience is that Yitzi patch doesn't improve the AI at all. I haven't extensively tested other patches that made claims about AI performance. I think some of them might have only been targeted at SMAC, not SMACX, which IMO is unattractive.

I don't know if there are any easy ways to improve the AI by patching the .exe. The worst thing the AI does, is build way too many units and run out of support. Writing complicated AI to "play better" in general, is at least equivalently difficult to writing a new game from scratch. Myself, if I decide I have to scratch that itch in this 4X TBS genre, that's what I'll do. It's piles of work and I'll never make a dime working on a 20 year old .exe.

Probably, rather than derail this intro thread, it would be better to talk about these issues in the Modding forum if you feel any need to continue. You may not; you may be determined to do what you want to do for your own reasons. I've slung plenty of ASM code in my life, it's an expensive undertaking.

Hello, I'm Alexhandr, a fella from the Southeastern US. I've been playing AC off and on for many years, but never really, really got into it until as of late. I play multiplayer games with a friend of mine and we still struggle to beat the AI on Librarian difficulty. To this day I don't think we've ever reached the end of the tech tree. One of us gets whomped somehow, someway.

I found you guys via googling "alpha centauri guide." Happy to be aboard!

Random quote

And the Lord God said, 'Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language, and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech'.
~The Conclave Bible